Cloud streamlines efficiency of identity theft

Working with cloud-based services significantly improves economies of scale – for cybercriminals too, according to Commtouch.

Phishers are already benefiting from free hosting by hiding phishing pages within hacked legitimate sites. Now, they are leveraging cloud-based form management sites, such as Google docs or formbuddy.com to collect information from unwitting victims.

With this technique, the phisher does not have to worry about creating/managing/storing back-end form data and can more easily scale the harvesting of phished data. Those duped into filling out the form will not be aware of this nuance.

We just hope victims are paying attention when they fill out a seemingly legitimate form that directly asks for an “email address password.” If their attention lags, they are giving the phisher a significant pay-off for a minimal investment: Identity theft.

This attack targets users of HomeAway holiday rentals – See the images below.

A look at the page source reveals that the filled in form is sent to “formbuddy.com” and not collected directly by the phisher. Formbuddy.com collects and stores all the responses to the “form” shown above and then emails a neat summary to the phisher (whose login name is “fanek”).